In the memo, the management of the ship had stated explicitly that all photography was forbidden during the passage through the Suez Canal. However, according to the captain and the crew it appeared that only photographing sensitive operations, the offloading of dangerous cargo, and military installations was truly prohibited.
“Legacy,” zim.com →.
“About XT Group,” xtholdings.com, 2015 →.
John Reed and Mark Odell, “Zim agrees restructuring with creditors,” Financial Times, January 23, 2014 →.
Reut Shpigelman, “יםסוער: ציםחזרהלהפסידברבעוןהראשוןשלהשנה,” Calcalist, May 30, 2016 →.
“Israel Corporation Approves Spin-Off of Kenon,” sec.gov, 2015 →.
“As Zim sinks, Ofer family’s UK shipping cos prosper,” Globes English, February 2, 2014 →.
“ציםבאדום: הפסדנקישל 56 מיליוןדולרברבעוןהראשון,” Port 2 Port, May 29, 2016 →.
For the ZIM container-ship residency, the resident artist signs a contract with ZIM requiring him or her to provide one work created during the residency to an auction, the proceeds of which will be donated to charity. This is also the case with shipping company owners Philip Niarchos and George Economou, who hold their art in a warehouse until it appreciates in value. Art is a lucrative side gig and thousands of works are stored away. The value of some of these collections eclipses the GDP of some small countries. Also see J. L. Holzgrefe and R. O. Keohane, Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Anshel Pfeffer, “Israeli Shipping Tycoon Sammy Ofer to Be Knighted in London Next Week,” Haaretz, November 13, 2008 →.
“האחיםעופרבסרטוןהתגובהל ‘שיטתהשקשוקה’ שלמיקירוזנטל: ‘מטעהאתהצופים’—גלובס,” Globes, July 26, 2009 →.
“רז , הילה. הסדרבתביעהעל‘שיטתהשקשוקה’: עידןעופרימשוךאתהתביעה—מיקירוזנטללאיתנצל,” The Marker, February 15, 2010 →.
“שקלאר: נשדראת‘שיטתהשקשוקה,’” ynet, September 15, 2008 →.
The trailer for The Best Day Ever (Самый лучший день) can be viewed on YouTube →.
ZIM 70 is a PR book produced by the company to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of its founding in 1945 →.
“Above all, you had to find a ship.” Claude Levi-Strauss reached safety out of occupied Europe on the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, chartered by the Emergency Rescue Committee in 1941. See →. Also on board were Anna Seghers, André Breton, and the novelist Victor Serge. Walter Benjamin committed suicide only one day short of getting on board a ship, although according to Hannah Arendt, he didn’t see a solution in Israel nor in the United States. A monument to Benjamin was, by coincidence, erected in Spain by Dani Karavan, an artist whose murals now figure prominently in the seventieth-anniversary publication. See →.
ZIM’s relationship to clandestine operators is made quite clear in the company’s official history when it notes that ZIM’s ships and personnel helped run the “Aliyah Bet” operation, which secretly transported Jewish passengers to Israel under the nose of the British Mandate. For more on the operation see →.
This speech was written in the wake of the great Arab unrest of 1936 that included a massive strike at the Port of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. See Z. Ra’anan, “Israel—Bridge or Bridgehead? Some Regional Transportation Aspects and Trade Effects,” Israel Studies Forum, vol. 18, no. (Spring 2003): 107–26; 113 →.
Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2002), 74 →.
P. Hounam, The Woman from Mossad: The Story of Mordechai Vanunu and the Israeli Nuclear Program (Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 1999), 75–76; N. Mann, “ברילנטאישהים, היבשהוהאוויר,” ynet, December 30, 2000 →. ZIM operated its own freighter named Noga that was built in the 1960s in France. The INS Noga was built in Holland in the 1950s, so they only shared a named and were of course not the same vessel.
But from 1967 to 1975, fifteen other freighters—all from Europe or the US—rusted at anchor in the canal’s Great Bitter Lake, unable to transit the route at all. It was dubbed the “Yellow Fleet” for the sand that piled on the ships’ decks over the years. See Ken Jennings, “There Once Was a Country in the Middle of the Suez Canal,” Condé Nast Traveler, February 22, 2016 →.
For an brief account of Israel’s seizing of the Sinai, see →. See also M. B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 156, 165. The crew of the Dolphin was released after the episode failed to produce resounding condemnation by the UN, and Israel and Egypt reached an impasse regarding the circumstances under which Nasser would let oil tankers flying flags of convenience past the blockade in exchange for certain security guarantees. See M. B. Oren, Origins of the Second Arab-Israel War: Egypt, Israel, and the Great Powers, 1952–56 (London: F. Cass, 1992), 54–55. Absent from ZIM 70 is the account of the freighter Inge Toft, another “test case” for the blockade that ended with the vessel and her Danish crew impounded by the Egyptians for almost a year between 1959 and 1960.
I. Lewis, “Nkrumah Was a True Visionary: A Genuine Pan-Africanist,” The New Crisis 45 (July 1998): 44–46 →.
The original Black Star Line, active from 1919 to 1922, was founded by the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the US. It carried passengers and cargo between American and African ports. As the first steamship line owned and operated by African-Americans, it inspired the Ghanaians to adopt its name, and the black star itself for their own flag. See “West Africa: Black Star Line’s Role in Ecomog,” allAfrica.com, September 14, 2001 →.
Danny Zimrin, “זכרונותמאפריקה,” February 1, 2012 →.
Interview conducted with the company in Haifa on March 29, 2016. The Patria and Ronitz are also named in Appendix B of Uri Bialer, Fuel Bridge across the Middle East: Israel, Iran, and the Eilat-Ashkelon Oil Pipeline, Israel Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (2007): 29–67 →. Other ships named on the list, such as the Siris (lost in 1973) and the Nivi appear in the pages of ZIM’s anniversary book, though without mention of their involvement in the Israeli-Iranian pipeline venture. For a further listing of ZIM tankers from this era, see Danny Zimrin, “מיכלמלא, בבקשה,” March 17, 2012 →; and Yossi Melman, “Inside Intel: The Story of Iranian Oil and Israeli Pipes,” Haaretz, October 11, 2007 →. The entity controlling EAPC was registered in Lichtenstein in 1959 with 10 percent Iranian ownership.
Debora Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: The Economics of Piracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 157.
Berbera Port is the maritime economic entrepôt of the self-proclaimed Republic of Somaliland.
The IMB Piracy Reporting Centre uses three threat-level indicators: 1 means that vessels should be on the lookout for danger, 2 indicates moderate risk, and 3 is a full alert denoting extreme risk.
About terrorism, Israel and Palestine, war in Ukraine, Neptune, women, masculinity, the origin of religious rituals.
“Why and for whom is contemporary art so attractive? One guess: the production of art presents a mirror image of post-democratic forms of hypercapitalism that look set to become the dominant political post-Cold War paradigm. It seems unpredictable, unaccountable, brilliant, mercurial, moody, guided by inspiration and genius. Just as any oligarch aspiring to dictatorship might want to see himself … Both models operate within male bonding structures that are as democratic as your local mafia chapter. Rule of law? Why don’t we just leave it to taste? Checks and balances? Cheques and balances! Good governance? Bad curating! You see why the contemporary oligarch loves contemporary art: it’s just what works for him.” Hito Steyerl, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” e-flux journal 21 (December 2010) →.
Javier Pes, “MoMA and Tate directors urge UAE to lift artists’ travel bans,” Art Newspaper, June 1, 2015 →.
Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century (Brooklyn: Melville House), 3.
In “Politics of Art,” Hito Steyerl writes:“But now we need a quite an extensive expansion of it. Because in contrast to the age of an institutional criticism, which focused on art institutions, or even the sphere of representation of large, art production (consumption, distribution, marketing, etc.) takes on a different and extended role within post-democratic globalization. One example, which is a quite absurd but also common phenomenon, is that radical art is very often sponsored by the most predatory banks or arms traders and completely embedded in the rhetorics of the city marketing, branding, and social engineering.” See also Gerald Raunig, “Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming,” 2006 →: “If institutional critique is not to be fixed and paralyzed as something established in the art field and confined within its rules, then it has to continue to develop along with changes in society and especially to tie into other forms of critique both within and outside the art field, such as those arising in opposition to the respective conditions or even before their formations. Against the background of this kind of transversal exchange of forms of critique, but also beyond the imagination of spaces free from domination and institutions, institutional critique is to be reformulated as a critical attitude and as an instituent practice.”
Container Artist Residency is a project by artist Maayan Strauss that takes artists onboard commercial container carriers along existing international shipping routes. The first edition of this project was launched in 2015 in collaboration with ZIM Integrated Shipping Services.
Thank you to the crew of the Zim Qingdao for the many poignant conversations, especially the team of engineers and deck workers, and officer Alexander Shapiro, whom I promised to credit in bold red font. Thank you to my indefatigable, brilliant research assistant and fact checker, Paul Mutter. Thank you to Laleh Khalili, Sveta Libet, Daniel Trilling, Emma Beals, Elisha Baskin, Marian Kaiser, Adrien Cater, Hester Keijser, and Isabelle Darrigrand for your time and a sound advice, to the Hackquarium collective and Kunstbetrieb, and to Kostiantyn Strilets and Shaw Xu for technical and logistical assistance. All images copyright of the artist.